Linger and Leave
by LuteLyre
Summary: None of them ever cared. Sannin fic.


A/N: Sannin drabble that I started scribbling one day on the edge of a textbook made real! Thrown together haphazardly, but with love! Slightly less humorous than my other Sannin fic, A Thousand Kisses Deep, but still. Just a picture of the Sannins, because we all know they are totally kick-ass!

Also, this was sorta made in thought for eryxl! Because she said she'd like to see more Sannin interaction! Hope you like it and thanks for all your great reviews!

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Pairings: None really defined, but hints of Oro/Tsun/Jira, Oro/Jira, Tsun/Jira and Oro/Tsun. Yup, the whole mesh.

Warnings: T for language and a few suggestive themes. Probably most bland thing I've written…

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Linger and Leave

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_Flip and flop,_

_Things drop._

_Crunch and flake,_

_Things break._

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When Tsunade was ten years old she didn't care. It didn't matter how many rules were drilled into her head, it didn't matter how many times Sensei lectured on teamwork. She didn't.

She didn't care when Jiraiya practiced and punched at unyielding boulders until his hands bled. She could break rocks with her little finger, and Shinobi were supposed to take care of themselves, and he had pulled her hair yesterday.

Hard.

She didn't care when Orochimaru studied at his books and pages of dusty, corpse-breath scrolls until his eyes blurred and migraines hit so hard they prevented him from training. She knew the entire medicinal herb scroll by heart, and Shinobi were supposed to take care of themselves, and he had called her stupid yesterday.

To her face.

They cared little for her ails and ills when she was afflicted, and were more absorbed in their own highly interesting selves than the group as a whole. Even though Tsunade knew this went against the rules made for them in strictly lined handbooks and grave faces, she didn't mind. When they paid attention to teamwork, it was with leering eyes and snarky comments and so she doesn't bother herself at all with their maladies.

There are the times they get lunch together, and the enemies they've taken down, and the nights spent huddled peaceably into each other sides on missions all betting that she's wrong, that she should, but Tsunade has never been good at gambling.

Or choosing the winning side.

So she does bandage Jiraiya's hands gently and bathe the maltreated joints with a lime glow, and does approach the violently insipid creature that vaguely resembled Orochimaru nursing a headache with a tin of her mothers soothing sleep tea,

But she always makes very, very sure to sing, or laugh extra loudly outside Orochimaru's door, and slap Jiraiya's face extra especially hard afterward her tender ministrations, so that they understand that she doesn't care one bit.

Not one bit.

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18 year old Jiraiya doesn't much care anymore, not really, no. He's grown up, because grown up things are what he thinks of now, and grown up things have happened to him. That's what you have to do in a ninja world.

Caring is kind of stupid in the ninja world, you see. Jiraiya isn't stupid, he's an adult. So he doesn't care.

In all honesty, he gave up caring when things started to crumble, to split apart at the seams with war and ambition and all that stupid shit. Jiraiya knows, he's been through war frontlines and has more ambition in his little finger than Tsunade has strength. Which is saying something.

Privately, Jiraiya knows that his ambitions are still slightly ridiculous. They are the tinsel topped dreams of a child on his first day at academy, a sugar spun castle in the sky more than an actual goal. But he would never admit that to anyone, not even himself, so they stay shining.

Or maybe they don't, because the ones that are real, made of seeds in rich earth and promises to water and reminders daily, those dreams have tangled together and knotted and finally been thrown away. Jiraiya doesn't care anymore.

His chances with Tsunade are slim to none. Getting Orochimaru to act more human than bastard reptile is a lost cause. It is pointless.

(He is focused on his candy floss dreams now, because he doesn't care about pointless things anymore. They slip through his fingers often, leave things empty, but he tries hard not to notice.)

So when Tsunade and Dan have the rare but stunning fight, he has her cry on his shoulder and takes her out to get ripping drunk, which is always what she wants. But he always takes her back to Dan at the end of the day, because it's always what she wants and because he doesn't particularly care about how he craves desperately to smooth ruffled hair off a flushed forehead and taste a sake-bitter mouth.

Dan folds the inebriated Tsunade into his arms gently, always gently, and Jiraiya salutes him and walks away and doesn't notice how Dan's fingers slide over the sweaty face back at the door.

When Orochimaru says something rotten and rancid that nestles deep into his bruises and makes them ache, he doesn't care. No he doesn't, he _doesn't. _So he laughs it off, (he excels in laughing) and forces himself to clap a hand on the other teens thin, bone-sharp shoulder and walks away.

Orochimaru stares after him, calls him coward, his voice slithering hisses over stones full of malice. Jiraiya shivers a little inside, but doesn't let it show. He doesn't care about how he wants to turn and lay into that slick sicko, punch and beat until he _sees_, until he _understands_, that Jiraiya will never give up, that Jiraiya wants him, needs him like he needs the dreams, that Jiraiya _loves_—

He walks away.

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Orochimaru is old and older. Older and wearier and not even really alive anymore, just a collection of reformed skins that have started to crack and flake at the edges. Orochimaru doesn't care that he's old though, because he doesn't have to worry about dying like a plain and disgusting _mortal_, and he never cared about anything.

His chakra still burns electric, his plans still are fruitful and plenty, and his mind is still as sharp honed and analytical as always, so you can see how he doesn't need to care about anything.

Orochimaru doesn't care when he hears that Tsunade is Hokage. If anything, he finds it rudimentary. He doesn't care when he hears Jiraiya has finally returned from his wanderings. The thought hardly brushes his subconscious.

When the leader of Sound lies in bed late at night, confident and luxiorious, he doesn't think of them.

When he experiments with glowing eyes and hears the screams of victims and servants alike as their bodies writhe, he doesn't think of them.

When he goes walking along the alleys of the Sound compound, mucky and extremely _distasteful, _they do not even cross his mind.

But perhaps, just maybe perhaps, if it is a day with a clear sky and he has been in a fitful mood, sometimes when his afternoon meal comes and it consists of a row of three pork dumplings, perfect and glistening with sauce, perhaps for a second or two he will recall a high girlish laugh and a shock of prematurely white hair—

On a day where they had battled their hardest and knew themselves to be great, when they had sat down blood-splattered and heart-heavy and passed around a dumpling filled bento box in the shelter of a leaky war bunker—

Perhaps he might recollect how her hands felt when they glowed green above his skin, or the precise way his smile stretched his mouth comically and made the crimson tear lines crinkle—

Maybe he will notice how the steam from the dumplings seemed unbelievably sweet then, and hasn't really since—

And perhaps, if things have been going very well or very terribly, if Sasuke's been giving him trouble or the flowers smelled especially nice in his chamber that morning, perhaps he will picture a split-second snapshot of them, two without the third. Reunited right now at a bar, drinking as they always seemed to. He will picture it and know that Jiraiya's eyes will be huge on his face and Tsunade's cheeks will be dark purple-red and they will be laughing, because they both always knew how—

Then the thought will pass as quickly as it came, a hummingbird zipping through air. Orochimaru will most likely never realize he even had the thought, in a brain as sharp-circuiting and speeding as his own, spinning with a thousand things.

He will pass it by and it will never even be acknowledged. (This is probably for the best, all things considered, pasts unchangeable and bridges never even built.) But that will not matter, because Orochimaru doesn't care about anything. Never did, and never will.

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None of them ever cared a ryo and now things have gone past the expiration date and then some. Caring sours like milk, and some things drop out of hearts and minds and eyes, and others get thrown up out of stomachs because they don't belong, and won't ever do anybody a speck of good.

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But Tsunade will keep her mouth to the sake bottle and her hands on the slot machine, to prove and prove and prove the things she's forgotten how to say.

Jiraiya will wander the barren roads far from home and his own hearts lonely crevices, and he will clutch at the strings, just a little and never enough.

And Orochimaru will pause with chopsticks halfway up to inhale the steam rising from a dripping dumpling idly, and absentmindedly think that somewhere, sometime long ago, he had tasted sweeter.

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_Fin_

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…

A/N: Well! I kinda liked it! I did! What do you think? Give me your thoughts! I salivate for them!

Not really.

But maybe a teensy weensy bit. XD

Thankyou for Reading!

-LuteLyre


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